Editorial
EDITORIAL: Brookhaven is right to slow down fish farm
The fishy smell emerging from an aquaculture proposal in Port Jefferson Station has nothing to do with tilapia. It's the odor of suspicion clinging to a developer with a soiled environmental record. So the Town of Brookhaven was correct in temporarily taking away his building permit.
Eugene Fernandez leads the group that wants to build a fish-farming facility on land adjoining a nasty Superfund site, the former Lawrence Aviation facility. But he has a history of run-ins with the state's Department of Environmental Conservation, for solid waste dumping and sand mining.
Sand is a precious commodity, useful in construction and beach replenishment, and there's a long history here of not-so-legal mining. So, even though Fernandez's group has some aquaculture expertise, the town wondered: What if it digs up many tons of sand, hauls it away, sells it, then comes back and says, "Oops! The tilapia market has dried up. Never mind."
So, after first giving the permit on the basis of an agricultural exemption that the group claimed, the town has temporarily rescinded it. Brookhaven could later decide to reissue the permit. But without firm assurances that this really is about fish and not about sand, the town is right to go slowly. It will hold a hearing on this and on a zoning moratorium, so it can consider rezonings proposed in a study of the area. Meanwhile, keep the tilapia simmering on the back burner. hN
